Guest Blogger: Laura Bickle (Contest & Excerpt!)

Today’s guest blogger is Laura Bickle. Her debut novel, Embers, is first in an exciting new urban fantasy series that continues with her forthcoming second novel, Sparks. Laura also writes as Alayna Williams. Alayna’s “debut” will be Dark Oracle, Pocket Juno’s June 2010 release.

Magical Places: Serpent Mound

Some places are magical.

There are some places that lodge in your memory like a splinter. Places that have their own pull, that bit of extra gravity that makes me want to include them in a book. For me, one of those places has always been Serpent Mound, and I included it as a setting for EMBERS.

Serpent Mound is the largest serpent effigy mound in the U.S. It’s located in rural Ohio, in a green meadow near forest – overall, a very peaceful place. I remember that my late grandfather took me there as a child. It’s about 1330 feet of coiling serpent, swallowing an egg. It was build around 800 BC by the Adena. Smaller burial mounds dotting the area were built by the Fort Ancient people. The head of the serpent faces the summer solstice sunset. Grass has grown up over the undulating curves of the mound. When I was a small child, I remember stroking the grass over the surface of the mound, wondering what lay beneath. Scientists have found melting in the rock beneath the mound – what they call a “cryptoexplosion structure” in the rock. It’s the result of intense heat.

And that question worked its way into EMBERS, bubbling up years later. In EMBERS, my heroine, Anya, travels to Serpent Mound to find clues about a magical creature, a large dragon called a Sirrush. She finds that the ghost of an Adena woman, walking along the edge of the mound, patrolling. Beneath the mound, a dragon sleeps. The Adena woman patrols the area to make certain the dragon does not awaken. Anya realizes that her destiny is the same as the Adena woman’s – she must find a way to make certain that the Sirrush hibernating in the salt mine beneath Detroit does not arise, even if it means the sacrifice of her life.

As an adult, I went back to Serpent Mound to do research for EMBERS. It was smaller than I remembered. I didn’t need to reach up to touch the grass at the top of the mound. But it was, in many ways the same: eerily silent, peaceful. It was a magical place worth revisiting both in person and in the book.

Contest:

In celebration of the Embers book release, Laura has generously donated one signed autographed copy of the book to one lucky reader. To enter the contest you must do one of the following actions. Contest closes on APRIL 2nd @ 12 PM EASTERN!!

1. Post about the contest on your blog. (Must include link in comments below for verification)

2. Tweet about the contest on twitter. (Must include @wickedjungle in the tweet to be counted!)

3. Add Wicked Jungle to your blogroll. (Must include link in comments below for verification)

4. As an added bonus, we will award two entries to anyone who uploads the Wicked Jungle badge (see below) to their sidebar.

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Excerpt:

Chapter One

Truth burned.

It always burned, even in the dark, cold hours of the morning when nearly everything slept.

Anya stood on the doorstep of the haunted house, hands jammed into her pockets, stifling a yawn. She’d taken a cab, not wanting her license plates to be seen and recorded in the vicinity. The cab had peeled away, red lights receding down the gray street. The two-story brown brick house before her looked like every other house on the block, windows and doors ribboned in iron bars. Cables from the beat-up panel van parked curbside snaked under the front door, but no light shined inside. Empty plastic bags drifted over the cracked sidewalk until trapped by a low iron fence.

She poked the doorbell. Inside, she heard the echo of the chime, the responding scrape of movement. Anya wiped her feet on the doormat duct-taped to the painted stoop, waiting.

A lamp clicked on inside the house, and the door opened a crack. “Thanks for coming,” the masculine voice behind the door said.

“It’s not like I could say no.”

That was the truth; it was not as if she could turn down what they asked, even if she wanted to. She held back a larger truth that scalded her throat: And I wish you would stop calling. I wish you would stop asking me to do this.

Anya stepped over the cords into the circle of yellow light cast by a lamp with a barrel-shaped shade in the living room. The shade’s wire skeleton cast dark spokes on the ceiling, illuminating a water stain that had been carefully painted over. But the water had still seeped through, yellowing the popcorn ceiling. A wooden console television sat dark and silent as a giant bug in the corner, rabbit-ear antennae turned north and east, listening for a dead signal. A shabby plaid couch dominated the room, covered with out-of-place pieces of tech equipment: electromagnetic field readers, digital voice recorders, compact video cameras. Laptop computers were propped up on TV-tray tables, casting rectangles of blue light on the walls.

Anya’s gaze drifted to the video cameras, then shied away. “I don’t want to be recorded.”

“We know.”

Jules, the leader of the Detroit Area Ghost Researchers, leaned against the wall, nursing a cup of coffee. No one would ever suspect Jules to be so deeply interested in the paranormal that he would lead a group of ghost hunters. He was the epitome of an ordinary guy: early forties, slight paunch covered by a blue polo shirt, well-worn jeans. A tattoo of a cross peeked out underneath his sleeve. Exhaustion creased the mahogany face underneath the Detroit Tigers baseball cap. Judging by the amount of equipment and the rolled-up sleeping bags in the corners, DAGR had spent a number of nights here.

Anya perched on the edge of the couch, rubbed her amber-colored eyes. “What’s the story?”

Jules took a swig of his coffee, creamer clinging to his dark moustache. “We first took the case two weeks ago… the little old lady that lives in the house was convinced that her dead husband was coming back to haunt her. She described lights turning off of their own accord, dark shapes in the mirrors.”

“Did she come to you or did you find her?”

“I found her.” Jules worked as gas meter reader in his day job. He had a knack for easy conversation, and people instinctively trusted him. Anya suspected he might have some latent psychic talent in getting a feel for places and people. He had an affinity for most people, anyway. Jules seemed wary of Anya. She didn’t think he liked her much or thought very highly of her methods. But she got the job done when Jules couldn’t.

“She’s got a basement meter and was afraid to go down there all by herself. Neighbor lady who used to do her laundry won’t do it anymore…said a lightbulb exploded while she was loading the washer.” Jules took a sip of his coffee.

“What evidence have you found?” Anya asked.

Brian, DAGR’s tech specialist, peered over one of his computer screens and took off a pair of headphones. “Come see.”

Anya sat beside him on the sagging couch that smelled like lavender. Brian scrolled through some digital video; she assumed it to hade come from a fixed-camera shot of the basement stairs. A flashlight beam washed down the steps, green in the contrasting false color tones of night-vision footage. The glow from the screen highlighted the planes and angles of Brian’s face. Anya noted the circles under his blue eyes and his mussed brown hair. She thought she smelled the mint of the caffeinated shower soap he favored still clinging to him.

Anya never asked where Brian got all his techno-toys. She knew that most of DAGR’s clients had little money and donations were few and far between. DAGR was more likely to be paid with an apple pie than cash. She suspected that Brian borrowed much of it from his day job at the university. Apparently, the eggheads in the IT department never seemed to notice that things kept disappearing into Brian’s van.

The footage paused, fell dark green once more. In the well of jade darkness under the stairs, something moved. The shape of a hand clawed up over one of the upper steps, then receded.

“Weird,” Anya breathed, resting her heart-shaped face in her hand. “What else have you got?”

“This.” Brian handed her his headphones, still warm from his ears. Anya fitted them over her head, listened to a static hum of low-level white noise that barely vibrated an on-screen noise meter.

“I don’t–”

“Wait for it.”

There. A hiss shivered the line on the meter. A voice–reedy and snarling–ripped the volume line to the top of the meter: “Mine.”

Anya frowned. “Can I hear it again?”

Brian backed the tape up. Static hummed, something hissed, and the voice repeated: “Mine.”

Anya pulled the headphones off, disentangling them from her sleep-tousled chestnut hair. Her hair caught on the copper salamander torque she wore around her neck and she gently unsnarled it. The salamander gripped its tail in its front paws, the tail sinuously curling down to disappear between Anya’s breasts. The metal, as always, felt warm to the touch. “Did you guys provoke it?”

“Of course. We told it that it was ugly and that its transvestite mama dresses it funny.” The youngest member of the group, Max, grinned at her, megawatt smile splitting his brown face. He’d been exiled to the floor, hands wound in his warm-up jacket, his sneakers and long legs tucked under one of Brian’s TV tables.

Jules smacked him on the back of the head. “Max got too mouthy with it. Started in on the ‘your mama’ jokes while I was reading the scriptures to it.”

Max ducked. He was still on probation and was very close to getting booted from the group. Anya hoped the kid would stay, that he would eventually fill the spot on DAGR’s roster from which she was trying to extricate herself. Though no one could do exactly what she could do, it would be good for them to have someone new to focus on.

“So…what is it, exactly?” Anya asked, redirecting the conversation from Max’s punishment to the matter at hand.

“We don’t think it’s the old lady’s husband.” Katie’s hushed voice came from the darkened kitchen as she pushed Ciro’s wheelchair across the wrinkled olive-colored carpet. Katie was DAGR’s witch. She was dressed in jeans and a patchwork blouse, her blond hair curled over her back, tied with black velvet ribbons. A silver pentacle hung just below her throat, gleaming in the dim light. “It feels like an impostor, something toying with her.”

Ciro folded his gnarled ebony hands over the blanket in his lap. The light from Brian’s computers washed over his small-framed glasses, and he smiled at Anya. “Hello, Anya.”

“Hi, Ciro.” Anya crossed to the old man and gave him a hug. He felt more fragile than the last time she’d seen him. It had to be a serious event for Ciro to be here… he was the group’s on-call demonologist. And he was the one who had brought them all together, over Jules’s objections. Ciro understood, more than anyone else, what it cost Anya to be here with them.

Anya put her hand on Ciro’s thin shoulder. “Is it a demon, then?”

Ciro shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think it’s one pissed-off malevolent spirit that’s moved in. The woman’s grief opened the door… but it’s a tough bastard.”

“You tried to drive it out already?”

Katie nodded. “Salt, bells… we even brought in a priest. It’s rooted here and we can’t dig it out.” From the corner of her eye, Anya watched Jules frown at Katie. He didn’t think much of Katie’s methods, either. Jules preferred to put the fear of God–or at least his version of it–into ghosts to scare them out the windows, but that seemed to be working less and less. Anya observed the carbon stains worked into Katie’s fingernails. The witch had been trying hard, but all her spells and incantations had also failed to drive it away. This had been happening more and more often in recent months: recalcitrant, restless spirits that just wouldn’t let go. Once a spirit had chosen to hang on, after all efforts to convince it otherwise, there was no choice but to remove it by force.

“The old lady wants it gone?” Anya asked, just to be certain. There was always the possibility that the old woman’s attachment prevented it from leaving. Perhaps, in her loneliness, she’d taken in a spiritual boarder. Anya understood how isolation could cause a person to unwittingly do things contrary to one’s best interests. An empty, silent house left a lot of room for ruminations, for regrets. And, sometimes, sinister things could move into those spaces.

“She wants it out. She wants to sell the house and move to Florida.” Ciro smiled. “I’m jealous.”

“Will you do it?” Jules’s expression was pinched. “Will you get rid of it?”

Get rid of it … that sounded so tidy. So clean. Like taking out the garbage. Ciro glanced sidelong at her, the only one with an inkling of what this cost her, over and over again.

“Okay.” Anya shrugged off her coat. “Take me to it.”

* * *

Bio

Laura Bickle has worked in the unholy trinity of politics, criminology, and technology for several years. She and her chief muse live in the Midwest, owned by four mostly-reformed feral cats. Her short fiction has appeared here and there. Embers, her debut novel, is first in an exciting new urban fantasy series that continues with her forthcoming second novel, Sparks.

Laura also writes as Alayna Williams. Alayna’s “debut” will be Dark Oracle, Pocket Juno’s June 2010 release.

To read more of this excerpt click here:

Author websites:

www.salamanderstales.com

www.alaynawilliams.com

Author Blogs:

www.salamanderstales.blogspot.com

www.delphisdaughters.blogspot.com